My Slim-Down, Get-Glowing Detox

Forget juice cleanses. This eat-as-much-as-you-want diet promises weight loss and clear skin. But did it work?

I knew I needed a change when I hopped on the scale a week after Thanksgiving and the number flashed higher than it had ever been. Granted, it was a few days after I had two Thanksgiving dinners in less than 24 hours, but the persistent tightness of my clothing and my general sluggishness suggested that the extra pounds were more than just a few big dinners. After catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror after a shower one night, I thought to myself, 'I can't possibly be pregnant ... right?' Nope. My food baby had just become a permanent fixture.

Enter The Detox Diet. My eyes light up any time someone even mentions the word "detox." The idea of cleaning out my body and ridding it of all those nasty toxins (pesticides, pollution, junk food) is just too appealing for me to turn down, so I have some experience when it comes to extreme (and, all right, sometimes wacky) dieting measures.

The juice cleanse route isn't for me. While I lost five pounds in three days, I also lost my mind. Even though there's a lot of hype surrounding juice cleanses and many people swear by them, there's also a lot of conflicting opinions about their effectiveness. While I admit they're a good option if you need to drop a few pounds in a short amount of time, in my case, the weight always returns in a week -- and I want the extra baggage I've been carrying around gone for good.

That's why "Gutbliss," a book and diet approach written by integrative gastroenterologist Robynne Chutkan, MD, got my attention. Who better to tell me what to eat than a doctor who studies the digestive system? Drawing on the Hippocratic philosophy "Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine thy food," "Gutbliss" relates issues like acne, bloating, constipation, asthma, and even autoimmune diseases to the state of the gut. With a nutrition plan designed with gut-health in mind, Dr. Chutkan says you can get better skin, healthier looking hair and nails, a trimmer body, higher energy levels, and a digestive system that behaves itself. Plus, you get to eat three meals a day on the plan, and there's no calorie-counting. I can have my cake and eat it too! (Except in this case, the cake is actually a mound of kale.) I'm in.

I knew I needed a change when I hopped on the scale a week after Thanksgiving and the number flashed higher than it had ever been. Granted, it was a few days after I had two Thanksgiving dinners in less than 24 hours, but the persistent tightness of my clothing and my general sluggishness suggested that the extra pounds were more than just a few big dinners. After catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror after a shower one night, I thought to myself, 'I can't possibly be pregnant ... right?' Nope. My food baby had just become a permanent fixture.